Home › Forums › Destiny of an Emperor › How We Pulled Off a “Joint Project” Mod
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August 26, 2022 at 7:46 am #55102MiDKnighTModerator
Hi All,
Just thought I’d share how we pulled off having more than one person working on the same mod. I think having a joint project(s) is VERY valuable as doing a quality mod is a ton of work. In Yuan Shao’s Revenge 3.0 Boneduke graciously agreed to rework the maps and did a great job with it. How did he update the maps while I updated other stuff? Like this…
We had to segregate who was going to work on what. Boneduke was going to do maps and warps so basically when I was doing my updates I would not touch the map and not touch warps. Likewise, Boneduke wouldn’t mess with the text banks, officer stats, etc… Every time I sent Boneduke a ROM I would put a date in it to keep track of which ROM he had. Like so:
So I would send Boneduke a ROM that was dated. He’d work on a world map area or a maze or whatever and when he got to a stopping point he’d send his ROM back. I would then receive the ROM, look at the date in the ROM and find the ROM I sent him with that date. I would then use an IPS patching tool (Lunar IPS) to create an IPS patch.
Unmodified File –> The original ROM I sent him.
Modified File –> The one he sent me with map changes.Then I’d create an IPS patch from that. The IPS patch basically could surgically insert his map changes without disturbing the rest of the ROM. Then I’d simply apply the IPS patch to my latest ROM and whala, new maps. I’d then check out the maps and move villagers around as necessary, change text, etc… to correspond to the map changes. Then I’d date the ROM again and send it back. We called this the merged ROM. I lost count of how many times we did this but it was a lot. He’d generally update one chapter at a time, or a maze or two, or a town or two, etc… We kind of timed it around real life events too. If Boneduke was going out of town he would send me his latest before leaving, etc…
This strategy worked very well. The golden rule is you can’t touch each other’s stuff. If I started updating maps and Boneduke did too then once I IPS patched the ROM the map would look like a garbled corrupted mess. Likewise if Boneduke updated text then the text pointers would be different in his ROM then if I IPS patched the entire text bank could get corrupted with text moved all over the place. So the trick to making this work is to segregate jobs. You updated this part, I update that part, etc… For a huge ROM project I highly recommend this approach. It’s just too much for one person to do an entire ROM. I don’t know how sonic did nearly 4 complete ROMs. Just craziness :P
August 27, 2022 at 11:30 am #55110Lord Yuan ShuKeymasterGood info here. Hopefully more folks heed this advice for future mods and can collaborate. Boneduke is clearly the resident map master. Imagine the amount of hours Sonic spent – pretty sure he is a teacher and would spend summers doing these? A commendable sacrifice for the DoaE community. I sometimes wonder about the original DoaE developers and whether they are aware of all the stuff that has been done with it. Would have to think they’d be proud
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Huo Hu's Adventure started Destiny of an Emperor hackingAugust 29, 2022 at 8:01 am #55119MiDKnighTModeratorAdded something to the RH guide about this:
http://doaerhguide.wikidot.com/start#toc11
In theory you could have up to 8 people working on a ROM.
In my opinion since there are already a lot of ROMs out there we should be working on quality not quantity :)
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